When I came down to breakfast in the same room next morning, I stared. The
blue had changed to yellow. The life of the water was gone. Nothing met my
eyes but a wide expanse of dead sand. You could walk straight across
the bay to the hills opposite. From the look of the rocks, from the
perpendicular cliffs on the coast, I had almost, without thinking,
concluded that we were on the shore of a deep-water bay. It was high-water,
or nearly so, then; and now, when I looked westward, it was over a long
reach of sands, on the far border of which the white fringe of the waves
was visible, as if there was their _hitherto_, and further towards us they
could not come. Beyond the fringe lay the low hill of the Atlantic. To add
to my confusion, when I looked to the right, that is, up the bay towards
the land, there was no schooner there. I went out at the window, which
opened from the room upon the little lawn, to look, and then saw in a
moment how it was.
"Do you know, my dear," I said to my wife, "we are just at the mouth of
that canal we saw as we came along? There are gates and a lock just outside
there. The schooner that was under this window last night must have gone in
with the tide.
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